Jesmyn Ward’s left wrist bears her dead brother’s signature – a tattoo, now a dozen years old, which honors her sibling and steels her against despair. That faded ink (and the companion script on her right wrist) is the rough draft for her bruising and beautiful memoir, “Men We Reaped,” which debuts nationally on Tuesday, Sept. 17.

Already hailed in early reviews, “Men We Reaped” parses the violent deaths of five young black men from Ward’s Mississippi hometown. The victims included her brother, Joshua Dedeaux, and a succession of close family friends: Roger Daniels, Demond Cook, Charles Martin and Ronald Lizana.

Those deaths came swiftly, in just four years, as Ward was taking her first steps beyond the Gulf Coast community of DeLisle, Miss. Ward's course led from a childhood of food stamps and hand-me-downs to scholarships at Stanford University. Eventually, it brought her to the glittering Manhattan ceremony where she was awarded the 2011 National Book Award in fiction for her second novel, “Salvage the Bones.”

“I fought against writing this memoir for a long time,” Ward said. “I knew that I had a story to tell, but I lacked emotional distance on those deaths, which hit me and my family so hard when I was in my mid-20s. I was circling the truth about what it means to be poor and black in the rural South -- what happens to black men, and what happens to black women. I also knew that I had to talk about my whole family; why my father left, why my mother endured, why some of us lived and others died. And I had to deal with my own guilt and a sense of worthlessness that no amount of scholarships and awards could cancel out.”

Ward’s passion -- and a hard-won calm -- came through in a recent interview at her new home in DeLisle. That tidy brick structure sits at the end of a rural road, shaded by oak and pecan trees. Ward, 36, lives there with her longtime boyfriend and their toddler daughter. She had the home built when she was pregnant, and completed much of the memoir there.

“It’s not history, it’s the present,” Ward said, reflecting on the introspective demands of writing the memoir. “Sometimes I would sit at my desk and bawl as I was editing the manuscript. It changed my view of everyone that I wrote about and helped me to see them as unique, conflicted and full human beings.”

On a drive around DeLisle and nearby Pass Christian, the immediacy of Ward’s history became palpable. She pointed to the site of her brother’s hit-and-run death, passed the homes of her mother and a slew of relations, and stopped at the expensive private school that she once attended with support from her mother’s employer. (Ward plans to send her daughter to the same school, although her teenage memories, detailed in the memoir, make it clear that she faced plenty of prejudice there in the 1990s.)

Jesmyn Ward's memoir goes on sale nationally on Sept. 17. Bloomsbury

Ward also stopped at her brother’s carefully tended grave. The cemetery sits by a rural park where Ward and her brother would meet their peers for midnight basketball parties. Conversations often went until sunrise, fueled by drugs, cigarettes, beer and frustrations about a town where opportunity was limited and the barriers of race and class were all-too-apparent.

“I lived away from DeLisle for long stretches, but I have always come back,” Ward said. “Sometimes, I’m wistful about that. It would be nice to live in the Bay Area. It’s a beautiful, cultured place – and, at heart, I’m a book-loving hippie bohemian. But if California freed me, it also made me feel like an alien. DeLisle is my center. It’s where my stories start. And it’s the one place where my daughter can grow up in a big, rambunctious extended family with a deep sense of history.”

Ward’s decision to live in rural Mississippi doesn’t surprise writer Sarah Frisch. The two women became friends in the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship program at Stanford – and Frisch has read all of Ward’s work in manuscript.

"We’re both writers, but our friendship is based on family,” Frisch said. “At Stanford, Jesmyn missed the intimacy of her hometown, and she ended up becoming part of my family. She would come over with a bag of videos, play with my oldest daughter, talk about obscure rap songs with my husband, cook dinner with us and gossip until 3 a.m. Jesmyn was there when I gave birth to my second child – and I can’t imagine anyone I would rather have around me for a home birth in an unfinished house with a nervous midwife worried about missing windows.”

Ward’s steadiness in friendship is mirrored in her writing process, Frisch said.

“Jesmyn goes to a very deep well when she writes, whether she is on a crushing deadline, or working in a room with music and television blaring. The things she needs are always there for her,” Frisch said. “It also helps that she has a purpose. She strives to show how her stories and her people fit into a broader history of racism and the South. She’s not a sociologist. Her work is more personal than that, too full of love and humor, but she also carries a responsibility to the people she writes about. In many ways, she’s a natural memoirist.”

Ward’s memoir makes it clear that there were plenty of joys in her Mississippi youth. She captures the goofy, high spirits of playtime with friends, the pleasures of exploring the surrounding woods, the savor of home cooked meals, and the devil-may-care charms of her errant father.

Such details add to the poignancy of her memoir’s many outcomes. In the case of her parents, the story led to divorce and lingering pain: her father chasing failed dreams and younger women; her mother erecting emotional walls while struggling to support her family as a maid.

Ward sketches their marriage with a generous, adult understanding of life’s vagaries. And she shows a similar grasp in writing about the five young men that she lost to drugs, suicide, car accidents and gunplay. In the headlines, such men often are reduced to case studies. In “Men We Reaped,” Ward memorializes their brotherly deeds and youthful vivacity; and in each of them, she finds the same despair that haunted her own youth.

“My first draft read like a chronology. Things just happened in order, but I was afraid to explore why they happened,” Ward said. “That was what I finally did when I was pregnant. I went through every page, trying to explain everyone’s behavior – and my own behavior, too.”

“Men We Reaped” gathers much of its force from the brutal honesty of Ward’s self-portrait – and from her clear-eyed appraisal of the white society that has admitted her to the table of privilege.

“When society tells you that your life means nothing, that you’re less than human, that you’re going to die young, maybe tomorrow, it doesn’t encourage you to act in sensible ways -- and that’s the message that poor black people get every day of their lives,” Ward said. “We’re the valueless trash that white people can ignore without taking responsibility for their part in the situation. For them, it’s a matter of black people pulling up bootstraps, but they don’t want to acknowledge all the privileges – the white privileges – that insulate them from consequences.

“As a girl in my 20s, I didn’t understand that. Stanford didn’t help me with the issue. Nothing could help me, and nothing could help the poor people dying around me. I wasn’t a fool, but to deal with it, I just drank shots of 150-proof liquor until I passed out.”

Despite all that, Ward survived to tell her story – and the story of her community. She credits the example of her mother – and the hope kindled by the birth of her daughter. She talks about the salvation that she found in books and learning – a passion that nothing has extinguished.

“People ask if it healed me to write the memoir, and in some ways it did,” Ward said. “Isn’t the first step to see things clearly, to admit that you have a problem? My despair came from childhood assumptions that no amount of encouraging could erase. On some very deep level, I knew that a little black girl from a poor family wasn’t worth much in the eyes of the world. But I could always read. And I learned to write. And I know that writing can make the world a better place for my daughter. I think that’s worth doing. I think that’s a reason to hope.”

Men We Reaped: A Memoir

By Jesmyn Ward

Bloomsbury, $26

Event: Ward is coming to New Orleans as part
of a 12-city national book tour. She will read from "Men We Reaped" at Octavia Books, 513
Octavia St., on Sept. 27, 6 p.m.